Infinity Kappa 65.9CS Component Speakers

Product Details
Manufacturer: Infinity
Distributor: Car Audio & Security
Website: link
Typical Selling price: (CAS) £149.99

A goodly few design elements add up to cunning for these Kappa speakers from Infinity. They have the Plus One® woofer cones, where you fix the driven cone to the outer edge of the chassis, using high tech adhesives. This allows bigger cone area and is jokily named from the line in mock rockumentary Spinal Tap. Also, the tweeters are edge-driven domes rather than the more commonly found ‘W’ or balanced dome. This is said to be more like a home HiFi tweeter and again, allows a greater driven area and thus better control and SPL. They also reach up to 35kHz, way beyond human hearing and thus hopefully will also have their first break-up mode way above what we can hear, too.
The passive crossovers feature a major single-switch -6dB control, as I gather the system is voiced to play through OEM grilles having been mounted in the horribly costly-looking-to-tool OEM Starfish„¢ adapter. This complex injection moulding allows you to mount the chunky and mad-frequency range tweeter in a bigger hole intended for an OEM driver. In the old days, this Kappa component level of system would come with awesomely tasty ‘˜EMIT’ electro-magnetic induction leaf tweeters that had a rare and delicate sound and always got blown up by over enthusiastic owners. Hopefully, this tweeter will give some of the truly detailed high end wanted, as well as some decent level.
The speaker wires on the woofer and tweeter connect via tiny Allen-headed hex wrench grub screws and are the smallest I have ever seen. The hole for a speaker wire is tiny and I felt it was just too weeny for its own sake. I was worried I would over-pressure the connection and either strip the supplied Hex wrench or damage the over-delicate speaker connection system itself.
– Two-way components, 16.5cm
– Plus One® woven glass fibre woofer cones
– UHF edge-driven dome tweeters, supplied with multiple mount options, I-Mount„¢ & Starfish„¢ OEM adapter
– Impedance: 2 Ohms
– Power Handling: 90W RMS/270W peak
– Passband: 45Hz to 35kHz
– Pressed Steel chassis, grilles supplied
– Sensitivity (1w/1m): 93dB
– 0dB/-6dB HF switch on top of passive crossover, which contains Poly caps and air-core inductors
– Woofer Mounting Depth:63mm
– Complete with Allen key, speaker gasketing foam strip and screws and fixings but no wires
Thiele-Small Parameters
– BL Magnetic ‘˜shove in Tesla-metres): 4.27 T-m
– DCR: 2.28 Ohms
– Mms (Moving mass): 15.26g
– Sd (area of cone): 141cm sq
– Cms: 338µm/N
– Vas (volume air compliance equivalent): 9.44 Litres
– Fs (lowest frequency of cone assembly/suspension resonance): 70.1Hz
– Qes (‘˜electrical’ Q): 0.84
– Qms (‘˜mechanical’ Q: 7.8
– Qt (total Q): 0.76
Editor Review : Infinity Kappa 65.9CS Component Speakers
There is definitely a delicacy to the Kappa sound I like and enjoy. Even if it isn’t the exalted (and far more expensive) set with the leaf tweeters from long ago, the sound of these was able to put edge and placement of elements of the sound stage right where they needed to be.
I was also pleasantly surprised at the effective weight the Plus One„¢ cones in the midbasses were able to muster, as they did some decent lows and made them believable as an adjunct for some weight from the ovals in the test rig set up (the Infinity Reference 6933i 6x9s) and even coped with meeting up with a subwoofer when said ovals were turned down on the four channel amp used to drive both sets.
I was a tad worried about buyers having to pay for some really superior mounting hardware they may never need but if you do have a car with multiple holes (the sort that would have bragged about speakers by quantity, not quality in their OEM sales spiel) then you can mount the substantially weighty little HF spud in the gaps a little mid would have come from. These are then great VFM for those buyers but you have to be paying something for that bit alone. The rest of the tweeters’ mounting kit is comprehensive, with threaded parts, cups and surface/swivel mount options all catered for.
I liked the simple and clean design of the passives but felt the -6dB adjustment switch hid a damn great resistor and while the voicing was a bit bloody strident on 0dB or no attenuation when cranked up loud, I did not like the sound when the tweeter was switched to the -6dB position. As ever, I feel these resistors do too much damage to the perceived quality to be worth the idea. This is about the whole product’s voicing being designed to cut through OEM grille materials and still have high frequency crispness. A bit like the THX through-the-screen raised-HF spec in the home cinema world, this is about getting a good result in the real environment they have to go in. Another feature to help sell them as OEM upgrades.
Also, the fact you can get these as 60.9CS or 65.9CS means it’s a choice of six inch, or six and a half inch midbasses, both made with a set of sixteen holes all around their circumferences to fit into any one of several ‘˜standard’ arrangements of screw holes to fix speakers in different marques of motor car. They are made to be as flexible as possible and recognise that you may discard the grilles they supply, how ever smart they look.
I played my audiophile and then some lunatic material through the speakers at different levels. For long-term use at high pressures, they will fatigue your ears pretty quickly. At sensible levels, though, they will be musical and remarkably high quality sounding for the price, especially counting how much plastic ware you will not be using, yet paying for! I am impressed by how well glass fibre works as a cone material as you get some of the benefits of the far costlier Kevlar and carbon fibre materials (very low weight yet close-to-pistonic behaviour of a tough woven material with near-incompressible fibres) but with none of the cost, since glass is cheap.
So if you like crispy and detailed and need a good choice of mounting options for your tweeters in order to get away with even using component speakers, then these are a great bet.
Overall 8.4
Sound Quality 9
Build Quality 8
Power Handling 8
Efficiency 9
Value For Money 8